He breathed out so fast and hard he moaned. He hauled himself through the exit, collapsing across the floor in the dark room where Yagharek waited.
Isaac passed out for three or four seconds. He came to with Yagharek crying out to him, dancing from foot to foot. The garuda was tense but focused. He was utterly controlled.
“Wake,” spat Yagharek. “Wake.” He was shaking Isaac by his collar. Isaac opened his eyes wide. The shadows that caked Yagharek’s face were ebbing away, he realized. Tansell’s hex must be wearing off.
“You are alive,” said Yagharek. His voice was curt, pared down and bare of emotion. He spoke to save time and effort, to conserve himself. “As I waited, through the window came the blunt snout then the body of a slake-moth. I turned and watched through these mirrors. It was racing, confused. I was ready with my whip and I hit backwards at it, stinging it across its skin, making it shriek. I thought that would mean my death, but the thing raced past me and the ape-construct into the hole, folding its wings away into an impossible space. It ignored me. It looked behind it as if it were chased. I felt a rucking motion in space following it, something moving below the skin of the world, disappearing into the tunnel after the slake-moth. I sent the monkey-thing after it. I heard a crumpling sound, the whiplash of straining metal. I do not know what happened.”
“The godsdamn Weaver melted the construct . . .” he said, his voice shaking. “Gods only fucking know why.” He stood quickly.
“Where is Shadrach?” said Yagharek.
“He got fucking taken, didn’t he? He got fucking drunk up!” Isaac scrambled to the window and leaned out, looking out at the torchlit streets. He heard the heavy, ponderous sound of cactacae running. As torches were carried along surrounding alleys, the shadows slid and shifted like oil in water. Isaac turned back to face Yagharek.
“It was fucking horrible,” he said, his voice hollow. “There was nothing I could do . . . Yag, listen. The Weaver was in there and it told me to get the godsdamn out because the moths can smell the trouble . . . Shit, listen. We burnt its eggs.” He spat the words with hard satisfaction. “The fucking thing had laid and we got past it and burnt the damn things, but the other moths could sense it and they’re heading back here right now . . . We’ve got to get out.”
Yagharek was still for a moment, thinking quickly. He looked at Isaac and nodded.
They retraced their steps quickly down the dark stairs. They slowed as they approached the first floor, remembering the couple talking quietly on their mattresses, but they saw in the flickering light through the open door that the room was deserted. All the cactacae who had been sleeping were up and out, in the streets.
“Godsdamn!” swore Isaac. “We’ll be seen, we’ll be fucking seen. The dome must be fucking crawling. We’re losing our shadows.”
They hovered at the front door. Yagharek and Isaac peered around the corner into the street. There was a crackling susurrus from the raised torches on all sides. Across the street was the little alley, its torches still doused, in which their companions lurked. Yagharek strained to see into its dark, but could not.
At the end of the street by the dome wall, under the stubby, boarded-up remnants of the house in which, Isaac realized, was the slake-moths’ nest, stood a gang of cactacae. Opposite them, where the road joined others and moved towards the temple at the dome’s centre, little groups of cactus warriors rushed by in either direction.
“Godspit, they must’ve heard all that ruckus,” hissed Isaac. “We have to damn well move, or we’re dead. One at a time.” He grabbed Yagharek and braced his arms behind the garuda’s back. “You first, Yag. You’re quicker and harder to see. Go. Go.” He pushed Yagharek out into the street.
Yagharek was not wrong-footed. He sprinted lightly, increasing speed. It was not panicked flight which might attract attention. He kept his pace just low enough that if one of the cactus people glimpsed motion, they might think it one of their own people. The shadows and stillness still varnished his fleeting figure.
It was forty feet to the darkness. Isaac held his breath, watching the muscles move beneath Yagharek’s scarred back.
The cactus people were jabbering in their harsh pidgin, arguing over who was to go in. Two swung huge hammers, taking turns to batter the bricked-up entrance to the last low house where, for all Isaac knew, the slake-moths and the Weaver still danced lethally together.
The darkness of the alley accepted Yagharek.
Isaac breathed deep, then stepped out into the alley himself.
He strode quickly away from the doorway, into the open street, willing his uncanny shade-covering to deepen. He began to jog towards the alleyway.
As he reached the midway point of the junction, there was a buffeting, a storm of wings. Isaac looked back and up at the window, on the vertex of the wedge of architecture.
Scrabbling at it with a repulsive desperation, the third slake-moth pushed its way through into the interior, returning home.
His breath caught, but the beast was ignoring him, its fervour reserved for its ruined spawn.
As Isaac turned his face again, he realized that the cactacae at the far end of the street had also heard the sound. From where they stood, they could not see the window, could not see the monstrous form infiltrating the house. But they could see Isaac running from them, fat and furtive.
“Oh shit,” breathed Isaac, and broke into a full, lumbering run.
There was a confusion of yells. One voice rose above the shouting and snapped orders. Several cactus warriors broke away from the congregation by the door and ran straight for Isaac.
They were not fast, but neither was he. They carried their massive weapons expertly, unimpeded as they ran.
Isaac sprinted as best he could.
“I’m on your damn side!” he shouted uselessly as he ran. His words were inaudible. Even if they had heard him, it was inconceivable that the cactus warriors, frightened and bewildered and pugnacious, would have paid any heed before killing him.
The cactacae were yelling, screaming for other patrols. There were answering shouts from neighbouring streets.
An arrow snapped from the alley before Isaac, whipping past him and thudding into some flesh behind. There was a gasp and a curse of pain from one of his pursuers. Isaac made out shapes in the darkness of the alley. Pengefinchess resolved from shadows, drawing back her bowstring once more. She bellowed at him to hurry. Behind her, Tansell stood with the blunderbuss drawn, aiming it uncertainly over her head. His eyes were scanning desperately behind Isaac. He shouted something.
Derkhan and Lemuel and Yagharek were crouched a little way behind, ready to run. Yagharek held his whip coiled and ready.
Isaac raced into the darkness.
“Where’s Shad?” screamed Tansell again.
“Dead,” shouted Isaac. Instantly, Tansell screamed with horrible anguish. Pengefinchess did not look up, but her arm spasmed and she almost dropped her arrow. She paused and aimed again. Tansell shot wildly over her head. The blunderbuss boomed and he staggered with the recoil. A great cloud of buckshot sprayed harmlessly over the heads of the cactus people.
“No!” shouted Tansell. “Oh Jabber no!” He was staring at Isaac, begging to be told that it was not true.
“I’m sorry, mate, truly, but we have to fucking go,” said Isaac urgently.
“He’s right, Tan,” said Pengefinchess, her voice desperately steady. She fired another arrow, with the spring-loaded blade that sliced a great gouge of cactus flesh. She stood, notching a third missile. “Let’s go, Tan. Don’t think, just move.”
There was a high-pitched whirring, and a cactacae chakri slammed into the brick by Tansell’s head. It embedded itself deep, sending a painful explosion of mortar-shards around it.
The cactacae squadron were approaching fast. Their faces were visible, twisted in rage.
Pengefinchess began to back away, tugging at Tansell.
“Come on!” she shouted. Tansell moved with her, muttering and moan
ing. He had dropped the gun, was crooking his hands like claws.
Pengefinchess ran, dragging Tansell. The others followed her, turning into the intricate maze of backstreets through which they had arrived.
The air behind them hummed with projectiles. Chakris and thrown axe-knives whistled past them.
Pengefinchess ran and leapt at an amazing speed. She turned occasionally and fired behind her, hardly aiming, before resuming her run.
“Constructs?” she shouted at Isaac.
“Fucked,” he wheezed. “You know how to get back to the sewers?”
She nodded and turned a corner sharply. The others followed her. As Pengefinchess plunged into the decrepit alleyways near the canal where they had hidden, Tansell turned suddenly back. His face was deep red. As Isaac watched, some little vein burst in the corner of Tansell’s eye.
He wept blood. He did not blink. He did not wipe it away.
Pengefinchess turned from the end of the street and howled at him not to be stupid, but he ignored her. His hands and limbs were trembling violently. He raised his gnarled hands and Isaac saw that his veins were protruding hugely, like a map across his skin.
Tansell began to pace back along the street, towards the turnoff where the cactacae would emerge.
Pengefinchess screamed for him one last time, then leapt mightily over a crumbling wall. She shouted for the others to follow her.
Isaac backed quickly towards the shattered brick, his eyes fixed on Tansell’s retreating figure.
Derkhan was scrambling up a little stairway of broken brick, hesitating and leaping down into the hidden yard where the vodyanoi wrestled with the manhole cover. It took Yagharek less than two seconds to scale the wall and drop to the other side. Isaac reached up and looked behind him again. Lemuel was running quickly down the alley, ignoring the desperate figure of Tansell behind him.
Tansell stood at the entrance to the alleyway. He shook with effort, his body coursing with thaumaturgic flow. His hair stood on end. Isaac saw little ebony sparks burst outwards from his body, snapping arcs of energy. The puissant charge that snapped and burst out from under his skin was absolutely dark. It glowed negatively, with unlight.
The cactacae turned the corner and were upon him.
The vanguard of the group were startled by this strange, darkly shining figure with hands crooked like a vengeful skeleton, making the air crackle with charged thaumaturgons. Before they could react, Tansell let out a growl, and sizzling bolts of the black energy burst out of his body towards them.
They rolled like ball-lightning through the air and smacked into several cactacae. The hex strokes burst against their victims, dissipating across their skin in crackling veins. The cactus people flew yards backwards, slamming hard against the cobbles. One lay still. The others writhed, shouting in pain.
Tansell raised his arms higher, and a warrior stepped forward, his war-cleaver held way behind his shoulder. He swung it in an enormous, powerful arc.
The heavy weapon smashed into Tansell’s left shoulder. Instantly, at the touch of his skin, it conducted the null-charge that sizzled through Tansell’s body. Tansell’s attacker spasmed mightily and was knocked back by the force of the current, spraying sap from his shattered arm; but the momentum of his massive blow sent the cleaver slicing and cutting through layers of fat and blood and bone, gashing Tansell open from his shoulder down to below his sternum, a huge rend in his flesh a foot and a half long. The cleaver remained embedded above his stomach, quivering.
Tansell called out once like an astonished dog. The dark null-charge fizzled out through the huge wound, which began to spew blood in a vast gouting torrent. Tansell fell to his knees, and onto the ground. The cactacae surged around him, kicking and striking out at the quickly dying man.
Isaac let out an anguished cry and reached the top of the wall. He gesticulated to Lemuel. He looked down into the dark yard. Derkhan and Pengefinchess had opened the way to the undercity.
The cactus people had not given up. Some not stamping on Tansell’s corpse were still running forward, waving their weapons at Isaac and Lemuel. As Lemuel reached the wall a rivebow sounded hard. There was a meaty thwack. Lemuel screamed and fell.
A massive serrated chakri was embedded deep in his back, in the spine just above his buttocks. Its silver edges poked out of the wound, which oozed blood copiously.
Lemuel looked up into Isaac’s face and screamed piteously. His legs shuddered. He flailed with his hands, sending brickdust up around him.
“Oh Jabber Isaac help me please!” he screamed. “My legs . . . Oh Jabber, oh gods . . .” He coughed up a great welling gob of blood which rolled horribly down his chin.
Isaac was transfixed with horror. He stared down at Lemuel, whose eyes were awash with terror and agony. He looked up briefly, and saw the cactacae bearing down on the crippled man, whooping in triumph. They were barely thirty feet away. As he watched, one saw Isaac watching and raised her rivebow, taking careful aim at his head.
Isaac ducked down, scrambled half down off the wall into the little yard. The open manhole wafted up noisome stenches from below.
Lemuel stared at him in disbelief.
“Help me!” he shrieked. “Jabber, fuck, no, oh Jabber no . . . Don’t go! Help me!”
He swung his arms like a child in a tantrum, the cactus people descending on him, his nails breaking and his fingers scraping raw as he tried frantically to claw his way up the wall pulling his useless legs behind him. Isaac stared at him in mortification, knowing that there was nothing at all he could do, that there was no time to go down for him, that the cactus people were almost on him, that his wounds would kill him even if Isaac could pull him across the wall, and knowing that even so, Lemuel’s last thoughts as he looked up were of Isaac’s betrayal.
From behind the mouldering concrete of the wall, Isaac heard Lemuel’s screams as the cactacae reached him.
“He’s nothing to do with it!” he shouted out in a rage of grief. Pengefinchess, her face set, dropped out of sight into the sewer that toiled below. “He’s nothing to do with it at all!” screamed Isaac, desperate for Lemuel’s wails to stop. Derkhan followed the vodyanoi, her face white, her ruined ear-hole bleeding. “Let him go you fucks, you shits, you stupid cactus bastards!” Isaac shrieked over Lemuel’s cacophony. Yagharek descended to his shoulders and gripped Isaac’s ankle fiercely, gesticulating at him to come, his inhuman beak clattering as he snapped in agitation. “He was helping you . . .” shouted Isaac with exhausted horror.
As Yagharek disappeared, Isaac gripped the edge of the manhole and lowered himself in. He squeezed his tight fat bulk past the metal lips and scrabbled with the lid, preparing to replace it as he dropped out of sight.
Lemuel continued to shout, in pain and fear, from over the wall. The brutal sounds of the terrified, triumphant cactacae punishing the intruder went on and on.
It’ll stop, thought Isaac desperately as he descended. They’re frightened and confused, they don’t know what’s going on. They’ll put a chakri or a knife or a bullet in his head any moment, finish this, put an end to this. They’ve no reason to keep him alive, he thought, they’ll kill him because they think he’s with the moths, they’ll do their bit to cleanse the dome, they’ll finish this, they’re panicking, they’re not torturers, he thought, they just want to stop the horror . . . They’ll end this any second, he thought in misery. This will stop now.
Yet the sound of Lemuel’s screams continued as he disappeared into the stinking darkness, and as he pulled the metal seal over his head. And even then they filtered tinny and absurd through the lid, even as Isaac fell into the stream of warm, faecal water, and staggered along the tunnels following the other survivors. He thought he could hear them even as he crawled through the dripping, trickling, reverberating water-sounds, underneath the liquid rush, along ancient channels like rutted veins, away from the Glasshouse, in a confused, random flight towards the relative safety of the mammoth night-city.
It was a l
ong time before they were silent.
The night is unthinkable. We can only run. We make animal sounds as we rush to escape what we have seen. Dread and revulsion and alien emotions cling to us and cloy our movements. We cannot clean them off.
We scrabble our wounded way up and out from the undercity and reach the railside hovel. We shiver even in the awful heat, nodding mutely to the clattering trains that shake our walls. We stare warily at each other.
Except Isaac, who looks at nothing.
Do I sleep? Does anyone sleep? There are moments when the numbness overwhelms me and clogs up my head so that I cannot see or think. Perhaps these fugues, these broken zombie moments, are sleep. Sleep for the new city. Perhaps that is all we can hope for any more.
No one speaks, for a long, long time.
Pengefinchess the vodyanoi is the first to speak.
She begins quietly, murmuring things hardly recognizable as words. But she is addressing us. She sits, her back against the wall, her fat thighs splayed. The idiot undine winds around her body, washing her clothes, keeping her wet.
She tells us about Shadrach and Tansell. The three had met in some ill-defined episode she glosses over, some mercenary escapade in Tesh, City of the Crawling Liquid. They had run together for seven years.
The window of our shack is fringed with ragged stubs of glass. At dawn, they snag ineffectually at the sunlight. Under a sharp rafter of the insect-fouled light, Pengefinchess talks in a gentle monotone of her times with her dead companions: poaching in the Wormseye Scrub; thievery in Neovadan; tomb-robbing in the Ragamoll forest and steppe.
Perdido Street Station Page 58
